A Critical Phenomenology of Trauma

What is trauma, and what can it teach us about temporality, relationality, and embodiment? Through exploring a wide variety of perspectives in philosophy and psychology, this paper offers a critical phenomenology of trauma that sheds light on our intersubjective experiences. This paper explores trauma as a loss of social, temporal, and psychic situatedness that can occur through traumatic events or broader processes of subjectivation and oppression. Because a critical phenomenological investigation of trauma is attuned to the historical and social factors that shape our (sometimes traumatic) experiences, I argue that critical phenomenology may help us identify trauma that has been marginalized, pathologized, and/or erased by dominant society. If trauma studies is concerned with opening up new paths towards healing, a critical phenomenology of trauma may help us imagine new possibilities for remembering, relating, and resisting. Ultimately, this paper holds that a critical phenomenology of trauma may help us bear witness to trauma survivors individually, communally, and institutionally.

Author

• Kelly, Molly

Language

• en

Keyword

• trauma studies
• Phenomenology
• Trauma
• Critical Phenomenology
• witnessing

Date created

• 2018

Type of Work

• Master's Thesis

License

• All rights reserved

Rights statement

• In Copyright

GW Unit

• Philosophy & Social Policy

Degree

• M.A.

Advisor

• Weiss, Gail

Committee Member(s)

• Trullinger, Joseph
• Wilkerson, Abby

Persistent URL

•  https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/k930bx28h